This year marks my 16th season as a professional handball player, and this preseason feels completely different from any of the previous ones. We started on July 20, and I think everyone has felt the extreme heat we’ve had this summer. We still have to train twice a day in it. I’m not saying this to complain. Far from it. I chose this profession, I love what I do, and I know exactly what preseason demands. But periods like this require an incredible amount of discipline, not only during training, but especially between sessions. You have to make the most of recovery and rest because you know that in a few hours, you’ll be back in the gym again. The sessions are hard because these are the weeks when you build the foundation for the entire season and push your body close to its limits. For the previous 15 seasons, life between sessions was pretty simple. Training, food, rest, recovery, and training again. This year is different and, to be honest, more difficult. Why? Because alongside professional handball, I’m also building a business in AI video production.
Back in January, I couldn’t have imagined how much I would enjoy creating videos with artificial intelligence, let alone that I could turn it into a real business. Because of that, I’m currently learning something else that I believe is extremely important: being completely present in whatever I’m doing at that moment. I’ll admit that sometimes my mind wanders. During training, I think about the business. While working, I think about handball. In my free time, I think about everything I still need to get done. I think this happens to everyone, but I really want to learn how to be 120% mentally present wherever I am, because I believe that’s the only way to get the maximum out of myself. When it’s handball, it’s handball. When I’m working on AI video production, I’m fully there. When I’m with my wife, I want to be with her, not only physically, but mentally as well. When I rest, I want to actually rest. For me, that is training too. Training the mind and building character. I don’t think the biggest challenge is how many things you can fit into one day. The real challenge is how present you can be in each of them. So many things I’ve learned through sport over the years now transfer directly into business: discipline, routine, persistence, recovery, performing under pressure, and understanding that results don’t happen overnight. Handball is still my primary profession, and I don’t want to allow even half a percent of my performance to drop because of the business. I don’t want my handball career to suffer in any way. At the same time, I want to find out how far I can go in AI video production.
When I look back at my handball career, I sometimes feel that maybe I didn’t reach my full potential. Not because I didn’t train hard enough, but because I had certain barriers in my own head. Am I really good enough? Can I actually get that far? Is that goal even realistic for me? I was always asking myself whether I was “good enough.” Maybe I simply didn’t dare to dream big enough. I wasn’t bold enough as an athlete. I’m happy with my career, and I still have years of playing ahead of me, but if I could tell my younger self one thing today, I would tell him to set his goals higher. What’s interesting is that in business, I’m completely different. Here, I’m bold in a way that I maybe wasn’t in sport. I have insanely high goals, so high that practically only the people closest to me know what they are. If I wrote them here, some people would probably think I’m a little crazy. But I don’t care. The more I learn about AI video production and this industry, the more I wonder where the limit actually is. If I managed to go from basically zero knowledge of production, AI, and business in January to where we are today, with growing demand and more and more clients, then I naturally ask myself where we could be in six months, one year, or five years. A potential client can be almost any company in the world. Every business needs marketing, content, and material to communicate with its customers. A client can be from Slovenia, the United States, Japan, or New Zealand. And despite how quickly the technology is developing, AI video production is still at the very beginning. The entire world is still learning how to use it, and a huge number of companies don’t even realize yet what this technology can make possible. That’s where I see enormous potential.
Entrepreneurship is also forcing me to learn new things every single day. When you start building something of your own, in the beginning you have to understand almost everything. You need to learn how to communicate, sell your service, find clients, build relationships, understand Instagram, TikTok, and LinkedIn, think about your website, content, marketing, and even how to write a blog. A year ago, I knew almost nothing about most of these things. Today, they are some of my biggest challenges and, at the same time, something I genuinely enjoy. Handball taught me how to train my body and my mind. Now I’m trying to bring that same mentality into entrepreneurship and AI video production, while making one promise to myself: this time, I won’t be the one setting limits on what I can achieve. If I don’t make it to where I want to go, I haven’t really lost anything. I’ll have gained knowledge, experience, and relationships. But if I decide today that something is impossible, I’ve already created a limit before I’ve even tried.
That’s why I want to give everything I have to both worlds without allowing one to suffer because of the other. At the same time, I’m learning that life isn’t only about handball and business. When I’m in the gym, I’m a handball player. When I’m working, I’m building a company. When I’m with my wife, I’m with her. When I rest, I rest. Not two things at 90%. Each one at 120%. And most importantly, what I maybe didn’t always dare to do in handball, I dare to do today.
Dream really big.